1.3 “The unquiet dead”
Having travelled to the very limit of the future (for Earth anyway) and to the point of the destruction of our home planet, we're now back two hundred years, in Victorian Britain, where we see a man mourn the passing of his grandmother. But all of a sudden, the corpse reaches up and tries to strangle him! The undertaker, seeing this, greets the scene with the air of a man who is thinking “not again!” and indeed calls to his assistant, as he tries to wrestle the lid back onto the coffin against the struggles of the recently dead grandmother, “We've got another one!” He is however unable to prevent the corpse from overpowering him and heading out onto the street. He takes his assistant, Gwyneth, with him to retrieve her, but they have no luck locating the old lady until Sneed, the undertaker, tells her to “use the sight”, whereupon the young woman seems to be able to see into the mind of the recently-deceased older one, and sees that she had been, before she died, looking forward to meeting a “great man, all the way from London”.
We quickly find out this is none other than Charles Dickens himself, as the scene changes and we see him preparing to go onstage, world weary and bereft of ideas, feeling worn out and as he says himself, “like a ghost trapped and doomed”. But the show must of course go on and so he walks out onstage to read from his classic favourite, “A Christmas Carol”, it being Christmas Eve. However as he comes to the part about Scrooge's knocker turning into the face of Marley, the elusive corpse, which happens to be sitting in the audience, glows and from it issues forth a noxious gas, which approaches the stage, scaring (if you'll pardon the terrible pun but I couldn't resist!) the Dickens out of the narrator, who steps back in horror.
Both Sneed and Gwnyeth, tracking the old lady's corpse, and the Doctor and Rose, newly arrived, hear the screams of panic at the same time and rush into the theatre. As the Doctor leaps onstage, asking Dickens where the phantom, which is now streaking around the theatre like a bat, came from, Rose, investigating the corpse, is knocked out by Sneed who tells Gwyneth “She's seen too much!” and they take her with them as they depart with the corpse. Inside the theatre, the phantom seems to be sucked into a gas lamp, and vanishes. Rushing out onto the street the Doctor is just in time to see Rose being carried away and grabs a hansom cab to pursue it. When Dickens remarks that the cab is his, the Doctor has him come with him, still not knowing who he is. When the author's identity is revealed, the Doctor is beside himself with joy. He gushes so much and compliments Dickens on his books, and seems to have such a knowledge of them, that the writer thinks better of his original intention of calling the police, and, especially when he realises there is a lady involved, settles back for the chase.
Back at the mortuary, it seems whatever was onstage and lately in possession of the old lady has returned with them, and as Rose regains consciousness it flits into the bodies of two other corpses. The Doctor and Dickens arrive, demanding entry, and the Doctor notes the unusual activity in the gas lamps, and rescues Rose just in time. The corpses say something about opening a rift, and that they are dying. They plead for help before leaving the two bodies, which then collapse, dead again.
When things have settled down, Sneed tells them that this sort of thing has been happening for a while, that the house is rumoured to be haunted --- which is a good marketing tool for an undertaker, certainly provides the correct ambience! --- while the Doctor says the activity is due to a rift, a weak point in time which is separating dimensions, and through which these gaseous beings are coming. Dickens doesn't believe a word of it: he may write such fanciful tales but he puts no store by them in the real world. To him, there is a vast difference between the world of fantasy that he writes about and real life. Rose finds out about Gwyneth's “sight” when she realises that the serving girl has correctly deduced that Rose's father is dead, though nothing has been mentioned of him. She also probes deeper, unwittingly, almost involuntarily, seeing through Rose's eyes the city of London in her time, and further, to the TARDIS and the infinities of space.
Just then the Doctor appears; he's been listening and he tells Gyneth that she is the key to this whole mystery. Growing up right on top of the rift, she is the only one who can solve the puzzle. He decides to hold a seance, and during this alien beings appear, first as only gaseous entities like they saw in the theatre and the mortuary, but as Gwyneth, under the Doctor's urging, allows them through her, they stand as blue outlines of humanoids, and ask the Doctor to take Gwyneth to the rift and make the bridge. They explain that they are a race called the Gelth, whose physical form was destroyed during the Time War. They are now trapped in a gaseous state and want to use the bodies of the dead to clothe themselves.
Rose is shocked. The aliens say “your dead go to waste”, but she doesn't see it that way. The Doctor, without human morals and ethics, can see nothing wrong with this. He does not believe in a god, and even if one exists, what would he need with the empty shells of people who have died? All they're going to do is rot in the ground. Why not let these disenfranchised aliens use them, if it will help save the last of their race? They argue, to the point where the Doctor makes it very clear that his word is law, and if Rose does not like it he can drop her home. However in the end, as it should be, the choice is Gwyneth's to make, and she decides to help. The weakest part of the rift is of course in the morgue, so that's where they go and Gwyneth establishes the bridge through which the Gelth enter our world.
But all is not as it seems. Once across, the Gelth reveal that there are indeed only a few of them --- a few billion! --- and their aim is not salvation but conquest! Far from being a poor dying race they are alien invaders who now intend to make Earth theirs. The Doctor is suitably chagrined to find he has been lied to and fooled so easily. What do they say? There's no fool like an old fool? Trapped by the aliens, the Doctor and Rose are in a bad situation but Dickens has run off, spooked by what he has seen. Unnoticed, he has made it out to the street where inspiration strikes. Turning the gas laps off he forces the gas into the air, drawing the creatures out of the cadavers...? I don't really follow that logic, but anyway it happens and the Gelth are reduced to their gaseous forms. Now all that remains is for Gwyneth to return them whence they came.
But there's a problem. She isn't strong enough. She does however, at the Doctor's urging, realise that millions will die if she can't stop the Gelth, and so she agrees to hold them in this place, in their gaseous form, and produces a box of matches... As the trio run for the door, she strikes the match.
Dickens, his ennui thoroughly banished now, and assured by the departing Doctor that his books live, literally, forever, returns to London reinvigorated, and with many new ideas for forthcoming stories. Sadly, he is due to die next week and so he will never write them. But he will never forget either the time he met the mysterious traveller and his glamourous companion, nor the servant girl who saved the world, even if nobody will ever know of her heroic sacrifice.
QUOTES
Sneed: “The stiffs are getting lively again!”
(These are the words of a man who is above all things pragmatic. He has seen other corpses left in his charge walk, and though he can't explain it he seems to somehow accept it, and it just becomes another burden, another onerous part of his job)
Sneed: “Now hurry up! She was eighty six: she couldn't have got far!”
Sneed: “Stop prevaricating, girl, and get the hearse ready. We're going bodysnatching!”
Rose: “Leave her alone. She's exhausted and she's not fighting your battles.”
(The Doctor and Rose have obviously had a conversation --- a heated one, by the look of defiance and exasperation on Rose's face --- about this, and while he wants to use Gwyneth to allow the Gelth to cross over and save them, she is against the idea. But more than that: it's not just what would be seen as the desecration of human corpses, that the dead would walk again, reanimated by an alien force, and how that might be explained in Victorian Wales. There seems to be something inside Rose telling her that this is what this man does. Even though she has known him only for a short time at this point, she recognises that he uses people; he moves them like pawns on a chessboard, in this enormous and galaxy-spanning contest he is playing, and if sometimes they have to be sacrificed, well, that's just the game, and the ends justify the means. But she is a simpler entity, and does not see why those who have nothing to do with these intergalactic intrigues must be pulled into them. In time of course she will see she is wrong, and that the Doctor strives to preserve all life, but that he just sees things differently from his perspective, one we could never hope to understand or share.)
Rose: “You can't just let them run around inside dead people!”
The Doctor: “Why not? It's just like recycling.”
Rose: “Seriously though: you can't.”
The Doctor: “Seriously though: I can!”
Rose: “But it's just ... wrong! Those bodies were once living people. We should respect them, even in death!”
The Doctor: “Do you carry a donor card?”
Rose: “That's ... that's different!”
The Doctor: “It is different, yeah. It's a different morality. Get used to it or go home!”
(This is the first time we really see the Doctor angry. The petty ethics of this human are getting in the way, complicating what, to him, is a near-perfect system and clouding it with superstition (as he sees it), morality and judgement. He can see no downside, but Rose can. In the end, she will be proven to have been right, however right now the Doctor is warning Rose that there is more of this to come, and that if she can't cut it out here, where the rules are different, she may not be the right stuff for this kind of life. As Q once said to Picard: it's dangerous out here, not for the faint hearted! In other words, if you want to play with the big boys, toughen up and face difficult decisions.)
The Doctor: “What about me? I saw the fall of Troy! I saw World War V! I pushed boxes at the Boston Tea Party! And now I'm gonna die, in a dungeon. In Cardiff!”
(It's clear this last is the most galling of all to the time traveller. What a way to go!)
The Doctor (on seeing Rose in her dress): “Blimey! You look beautiful! Considering...”
(He qualifies this as “considering you're human”, but you can see the sudden hesitation, even fear or uncertainty in his eyes. He realises he's paid this girl whom he hardly knows quite a compliment, and the Doctor is not known for such extravagance and displays of emotion. He's not used to it, and quickly looking away he shuts it down immediately, but both of them know that something very special has happened, and unspoken words have been said.)
Questions
Why is it that the Doctor never seems to have to change, to fit in with his surroundings, yet his companions do? As Rose goes to run out into what is now Victorian Cardiff, he checks her, in her sweatshirt and jeans, and advises her she had better change into a dress. Yet he goes out dressed exactly as he always is. I know the idea of psychic paper: is the entire form of the Doctor a kind of variant of that? That people see what he wants them to see? Can he bend their reality, their perception of him, so that he seems to fit in, seems to be wearing clothing appropriate to the time and/or planet he is visiting?
When Dickens, shaken by what he has seen and worried that he may have “got it wrong”, asks has his life been wasted, both in the charitable causes he champions and his writings, why does the Doctor not reassure him that, far from being a useless or misguided or wasted life, his destiny is to become one of the true immortals, to live forever in the hearts and minds of people and to be forever copied, translated, imitated and celebrated as long as humans are around? Yes, he does so later, near the end, but right now, at this moment, the greatest author of our time is having a crisis of confidence. Why does the Doctor not give him the reassurance he needs? Perhaps it's because he has yet to drop the bombshell of being a time traveller. Yet, he could certainly give some words of comfort, and he does not.
When Rose makes the very pragmatic observation that the Doctor's idea to allow the Gelth to inhabit corpses is doomed to failure, as there were nothing of the sort in 1869, he gives her an irritated speech about “everything being in flux”. He says time can change like that (snaps his fingers) and yet much of his personal mission is to stop things occurring that are not meant to have done, as we will see in future episodes. So if this happens because the time lines are changed, surely he should be trying to prevent it? Or is this just lazy storywriting? As A Time Lord, the Doctor has control over time, but that does not mean he can change it, or allow it to change, willy-nilly. What about cause and effect? Has he considered that if the Gelth survive they may turn out to be evil (as they do) and may in fact alter the very course of galactic history? Has he thought about the ramifications such a momentous decision may have on the future? Has he worked out all the pros and cons? No: he sees an alien race on the brink of extinction and his innate (for want of a better word) humanity makes him want to do all he can to save them. But even more importantly than that, he is determined that he will force his will on anyone who gainsays him, and he always --- always --- believes himself to be right. Today, that will change, as his immovable certainty and confidence in his superiority will be shaken to its very foundations, and he will find that, even though he has lived for almost a thousand years, even he can make a mistake, make the wrong call, and sometimes it needs another living being, who is seeing the situation from a different angle, to show him he is wrong.)
Laughing in the face of death
The Doctor: “I'm such a big fan.”
Dickens: “How are you a fan? In what way do you resemble a means to keep oneself cool?”
Dickens: “What the Shakespeare is going on?”
The Doctor: “Now don't antagonise her: I love a happy medium!”
Evolution of a Timelord
At this point I think we can see that the Doctor is still relatively alien --- compared to how human he ends up after a while. He sees the idea of using human corpses as “vehicles” for the Gelth as not only not abominable, but as quite clever and even useful. He sees it as a solution to a problem, a justified use of resources. He can't see beyond the logic and pragmatism of the approach to be able to even begin to understand Rose's horror at the idea. His interaction with humans has been, up to now, so far as I know from the older series, rather minimal in that he spent a lot of time on alien planets and never really crossed paths with humanity, other than his companions. But as this series is going to involve a lot of human interaction, he is going to have to become less the alien Timelord and more the understanding human. He may wish Rose (and later companions) to follow his code of conduct, think as he does, reason as he does and have the same values and ethics as he, but in time he will realise that it's a two-way street, and if he wants to keep company with humans he is going to have to start to think, act and even reason like one. What may seem perfectly acceptable to him may be abhorrent to his human companion, and this is the first example of such a thing, if you discount his rather so-what attitude to the destruction of the Earth in the previous episode.
The look on Rose's face when she sees the Doctor emerge from the house, alone, tells you all you need to know about how she feels at this point. The Doctor had promised to save Gwyneth, but he never really had any intention of doing so. Well, maybe he had but when push came to shove he knew he had to leave her to her fate. Rose is crushed: this man she had believed could fix anything, make anything right, do anything, has failed her. He has been unable to save Gwyneth, and Rose can begin to see that, brash and confident as he may be, the Doctor is not omnipotent. Sometimes, he's just a man.
And sometimes he is the Doctor, and knows all. Or thinks he does. Perhaps in these instances he's unintentionally being more human than he realises, as it's basic compassion that leads him into believing that the Gelth are deserving of a chance of peace. Despite what he says about animating human corpses, he realises that this cannot be a long-term solution, and offers to take the aliens somewhere that they can rebuild and fashion proper bodies. He doesn't realise he's being played, and that Rose, the stupid, inexperienced, emotional Earth girl, was right all along when she opposed the plan. As she will be again. And again.
This is not the last time that the Doctor will be fooled by perhaps listening too easily to a creature's pleas, or more likely, believing he knows better than everyone else. At times, his arrogance will very nearly be his undoing, and by extension, that of those close to him.
Enemy mine
We're not told a whole lot about the Gelth, just that they were involved (possibly on the fringes of, or even as victims of) the Time War and that the ones that remain are the only survivors. Of course, they lied in order to try to trick their way into invading Earth, so that may be horse hockey too, but it's clear that the mention of the Time War has a profound effect on the Doctor, as he is known to have fought in it, been a central figure in it. Was it used as another ploy? Did the Gelth know who the Doctor was? Beings of pure energy, existing in gaseous form (at least, now) they cannot gain a foothold in our world without using host bodies, and when it becomes clear they are going to get what they want, a bridge to the other side, they reveal themselves to be a violent, hateful, warmongering race of conquerors. It seems unlikely that they were in any war they did not triumph in.
In the end, they are presumably all destroyed when they are held in the arch, the weakest point of the rift down in the morgue, the point at which they crossed over, and Gwnyeth destroys the house. It's interesting to note, though it was probably only done for effect, that when they seem poor, doomed, homeless souls they manifest as blue, and when their true nature is revealed not only do they turn red but they sprout horns! Labouring the point much?
I do wonder though how long they've been trying to get through? Gwyneth says they have been speaking to her all her life --- she calls them “her angels” --- and her mother knew of them, so it's possible they sang to her, too, just waiting for the time when someone with the proper knowledge, experience and technology would come along and allow them to be released, or as it turned out, unleashed. Perhaps they've been trying for centuries.